Systemd 208: hang on reboot

Hi,

I have installed Arch on an acer V5-573G. I popped in a SSD drive as a system drive and I have pretty much everything working as I had hopedThe only thing that does not work is a shutdown. Looking in the log files I have the following

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

It seems as if whenever systemd is upgraded, that my system hangs if I try to reboot it. It drops to the console output, then does nothing. When I force it by powering off and repowering, it gives me "recovering journal" messages on boot.

It does this every time systemd upgrades. I presume that it has to do with the new systemd not being able to properly reboot a system when a new version is just dropped into the middle of it (for lack of a better explanation). Is there something ELSE I should be doing specifically after a systemd upgrade, or...

For me the experience is more similar to what is described on the second link, in my case xfce was terminated and I was dropped into a black blank screen(1).

On one of the systems I could see that the system was still responsive because pressing ctrl-alt-del would make the HD light blink but the system wouldn't restart, since systemd now manages that I guess that if it was not working then ctrl-alt-del would not work. I could also see the kernel messages telling the sysrq actions I was requesting were not allowed.

On another system the behavior was exactly the same, with the difference that I configured things so I could use all the functionality of sysrq which allowed me to reboot the system that way.

For both systems, after restarting with systemd 208 both reboot and shutdown now work fine.

(1) I don't use a login manager so every time I reboot/shutdown I see some systemd messages about mounting some partitions on access before seeing the messages that briefly show up before reboot/shutdown, this time I was just dropped into a black blank screen as if X was still running somehow and things didnt reach the VT yet.

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

Systemd 208 has changed some permissions for its journaling. The place where systemd stores its journal data is supposed to belong to group "systemd-journal" and have the SETGID bit set (the bit which is usually designated by a "2" before the normal permissions, such as 2755 in one of the posts above). Maybe just setting the /var/log/journal permissions to 2755 and the group to systemd-journal helps?

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

@Runiq: so the following is already done by the pacman upgrade itself (from your link to the 208 announcement): "However, we recommend adjusting it manually after upgrades too (or from RPM scriptlets), so that the change is not delayed until next reboot."? Or is that the issue at hand here? This thread is not marked [fixed], so I just want to make sure this is not a required manual step for upgrading systemd 207 to 208?

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

I also had curious problem with systemd 208-1.It took about 15-20 seconds for KDE Dolphin to open with systemd 208-1. After downgrading to 207-5 (to make sure that systemd was the root of the problem), Dolphin starts normally.

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

I think it matters (according to the bug) whether you are using persistent journal files or not. If journald is logging to /var/log/journal/..., the problem shouldn't manifest because the permissions should be right. If it is logging to /run/..., however, you may see the bug because initially the permissions were not being set correctly in that case. So whether it is the issue in the OP's case or not, for example, may depend on whether the OP has disabled persistent journalling.

If, that is, I've understood this correctly (which may very well not be the case).

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

Re: Systemd 208: hang on reboot

for folks who had the hang, maybe there are clues in the systemd logs? maybe the entry near the bottom of this comment showed up in your logs when you upgraded - get the logs using this

journalctl -e -n999999

then search for the entry below - I found it with

?systemd.*208

The question mark is to search backwards, because that journalctl command puts less at the bottom of the logs, This was the entry where systemd was restarted by pacman. Maybe your entry, (or more entries surrounding it) has more information.